Jo Labadie was both the great grandson and the great-great
grandson of
Antoine Louis Descompte dit Labadie, who was born in
Montréal in 1730 and moved to the French fortress town of
Detroit at the age of 10. He apparently sired 33 children among
three wives, and with additional large families in the second
generation, it became common for Labadie cousins in the
Michigan-Ontario area to intermarry. Antoine Louis's second wife,
Marie, said to be the daughter of an Ojibway chief, was Jo's
great-great grandmother, and his third wife, Charlotte, was Jo's
great grandmother.

Antoine Louis purchased a plot of land in Sandwich, Ontario in
1767 and moved there with his wife Marie, who died around 1784.
This farm, with a windmill, stayed in the family until 1856, when a
grandson representing the nine surviving children of Antoine
Louis's first wife sold more than half the property to Hiram
Walker, who built a distillery and mill there in 1857. The success
of Walker's company town resulted in the naming of the area
"Walkerville."

Louis Descompte dit Labadie, a son of Antoine Louis and Charlotte,
had a daughter, Euphrosyne Angelique Labadie, who was Jo's mother.
In 1849 Euphrosyne married her distant cousin Antoine (Anthony)
Cleophis Labadie (great grandson of Antoine Louis and Marie), of
Paw Paw, Michigan. Charles Joseph (Jo) Antoine Labadie, the eldest
of their children, was born in Paw Paw on April 18, 1850. After the
birth, the family moved to the Labadie estate on the Canadian side
of the
Detroit River where they lived in peace with the neighboring
native people of Walpole Island. When Jo was six or seven, his
family, being the dispossessed branch, was forced to move off the
property in Ontario when it was sold to Hiram Walker, and they
settled near his father's hometown of Paw Paw.

Jo's father, Anthony Cleophis, was most at home living in the
wilderness, and was probably pleased to be made to vacate the
Labadie estate and move his family back to the woods of
southwestern Michigan. Having lived among the Native Americans in
the forests of Michigan since the age of 14, he was uneasy with
village life. He often took Jo on hunting expeditions or trips for
which he served as interpreter between the Native Americans and
Jesuit missionaries. This was the life that impressed young Jo, and
that he remembered with fondness. Many of his poems (
16,
17) and reminiscences reveal a passionate sentiment for this
simple but fulfilling existence. Ultimately Jo's father could not
subdue his wandering spirit and love of the wilderness, and in 1869
left his family and settled in Kalkaska in the northern lower
peninsula of Michigan.

As the
eldest child in a large and poor family, Jo became the mainstay
of his mother and of his agreeable but feckless father. When
adolescence neared, and with it the possibility of a more
substantial livelihood, Jo was first sent to learn watchmaking with
an uncle. After a year he left, being attracted to the hurly-burly
of an apprenticeship in a printing shop with its lively discussion
of the issues of the day. Printing was the profession he practiced
for some twenty-five years, until ill health forced him to seek
another livelihood. He remained a printer (
34,
35) by avocation for the rest of his life.

"It's a hard matter to 'line up' the
Labadies. I cannot make out your family to my satisfaction... I
cannot find out where Mr. Francis Labadie of Macomb County comes
in. He moved to Macomb County about 1814 or 1815, and as Father
Richard excommunicated him, he sued the Priest and got a judgment
for $1600. Much trouble followed."

C. M. Burton to Joseph Labadie, November
30, 1917

On Cranky Notions: "These notions will
occasionally be to some people like stroking the fur of an animal
in the wrong direction, but I shall ask no one's advice as to what
to say or how to say it... I shall write to please no one but
myself, and if it please others, well and good. I hope to be able
to write only the truth and to reason well."